Behind those falling crime statistics in a lot of big American cities turns out to be more than a few stories of abusive rogue cops and institutionalized racial profiling.

Just days after four white New York City policemen were acquitted for pumping 19 rounds of bullets into an innocent West African man, the Los Angeles Police Department exposed a massive corruption scandal. Hundreds, maybe thousands of innocent people were set up and framed; others were beat up and a woman may have been raped.

Citizens in New York and L.A. are grateful that aggressive police have taken back their streets from gangs, but the long war on crime and drugs has taken its toll on minority communities and it’s changed the idea of policing.

At best, cops are soldiers now, not public servants. At worst, ex-cop Christopher Cooper says, some are part of the problem.

Policing the police is on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School

Christopher Cooper, former Washington, DC police officer and board member of National Black Police Association.

Frank Hartman, Director of the program of Criminal Justice Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

and Joe McNamara, former police chief San Jose police force and fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

Animals and infants both know teacups don’t float in the air, and 100-bannanas are more than ten.

That may not sound like much common ground, but cognitive scientists say they’re two important links in a mental chain that runs from mice to men. All animals can learn, and some can teach, and some can recognize themselves in a mirror.

Sea turtles, homing pigeons, even certain kinds of ants navigate better than your average urban man. In fact, the more that scientists try to parse the mouse-to-man gap, the more muddled the divide becomes.

The Dr. Doolittle dream escapes us, but animals do talk amongst themselves. Vervet monkeys have different cries for eagle, snake, and leopard – almost like our own words.

Birdsong and whalesong form the tune and the lyrics, but their meaning still seems less than human.

Human minds and animal minds, on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Elizabeth Spelke and Marc Hauser.

Jon Katz thinks it’s a great time to be a geek in America. The Internet has liberated all those pale-faced alienated youths without dates for Saturday night and installed them at the controls of the information economy.

A vital, compelling digital world saved millions of anti-social, brainy outsiders from the cliquey, conventional world that rejected and marginalized them. And the geeks have triumphed now over the suits and the old elite’s.

Finally there’s geek justice. Geeks are cool.

Katz is the official chronicler of the geek ascendancy. He says if you feel like a geek, you are one. If you feel a personal connection with technology, if you’re a fan of The Simpsons and The Matrix, and if you saw Phantom Menace the weekend it opened you’re a geek.

If high school was painful, if you didn’t go to the prom and life began after you graduated, you’re a geek.

The rise and revenge of the geeks is on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jon Katz

Bill Bradley, in basketball lingo, is suffering through garbage time, the closing minutes of a losing game against Vice President Gore.

It’s not really over, but come on….it’s over.

“What was he doing for the past week in the state of Washington?” That may be the lingering question among Democratic progressives about their wistful bet on the un-Clinton alternative-on the erudite and idealistic former Senator from New Jersey who proved a lot less charismatic in the primary season than he’d been in a Knickerbockers’ uniform.

A lingering image of Bradley may be the AP “brother-can-you-spare-a-dime” shot of the candidate with his collar up, a cardboard coffee cup in his hand, lost on a commuter ferry to Seattle among the working stiffs who ended up voting better than two-to-one against him on Tuesday.

Was it Al Gore that beat him? Or the McCain campaign that stole the reform ball for the other Republican league? What’s a liberal to do?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

The Republicans at each other’s throats now for the presidential nomination both call themselves reformers. But reform of what? At whose bidding? And for whose benefit?

H. L. Mencken warned us long ago that most civic reform is a process of sweeping the tired old tarts out of the bawdy house and replacing them with bright young virgins. So where’s the reform agenda and a reform movement you’d trust to solve a real problem?

John Judis’s beef is that the supercitizen species, the believable brokers of public-spirited reform, the Elliott Richardson types, have sold out or been crowded out, or just died out. Washington since the 70s, John Judis writes, is a capital of paid hacks and single-issue fanatics-not experienced policy-heads for the public interest.

What we need beyond a new president, he says, is a new elite that could show us the difference between economic reform and just another tax break.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

John Judis, senior editor at The New Republic and author of “The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust.”

Mao ZeDong wrote “Politics is war by other means” reversing Clauswitz’s famous dictum.

Mao believed in politics as a no-holds-barred struggle for the hearts and minds of the Chinese people – and more than a few lives were lost in the battle. Mao’s misbegotten Great Leap Forward mobilized armies of peasants to make China a modern nation and instead mired the countryside in depression and famine.

His Cultural Revolution took political war to the guerilla, house-to-house level – a kind of government-supported anarchy where neighbors criticized neighbors and communities “struggled” members who were suspected of “wrong thought.”

Through all the author of the Little Red Book those minions dutifully quoted from memory remained the inscrutable emperor in his Forbidden City, orchestrating chaos from behind his giant portrait atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Mao ZeDong and China’s struggle into the modern world – in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Philip Short, author of “Mao: A Life.”